I've experienced the same issues with Claude Code. I think it's very important that you sufficiently specify what you want to accomplish. Both overall for the project, but also for the immediate task you're trying to complete (e.g., new feature, bug fix). There are some good frameworks for this: - https://openspec.dev/ - https://github.github.com/spec-kit/

For most applications, it is certainly possible to never write code and still produce something substantial. But in my experience, you have to be really diligent about the specifications and unit/contract/e2e testing. Where I've run into trouble requiring me to dig into the code is when creating software that uses new algorithms that haven't been trained on.